I would argue that your math is faulty but your logic is basically accurate.

In the legacy program, you are omitting education sessions, Success/Leadership programs, HPL, CL roles, mentoring, officer and district officer credit. Even if your argument is that you're confining yourself to "speeches", facilitating a Success/Leadership program for ACG is quite an endeavor.

In pathways, each of those paths has either a Level 5 project that has a heavy leadership component or an HPL, depending on which path you pick. But I agree, if you're doing the minimum number of electives then the number of speaking roles is certainly less.

I haven't see a formal outline of what the Pathways capstone project requires but I suspect that it will be more focused on the leadership side of things.

It might be worth noting that there were similar criticisms when moving from the Able Toastmaster program to the Competent Communicator. Going from 15 presentations which a couple being in the public to 10 projects was felt to be a significant reduction by the experienced people at the time.

I have finished 40+ designations in the legacy program including every manual, every educational session, etc. (obviously my DTM) and I'm just submitting my second completed path in Pathways. I comment simply in terms of establishing credibility for any statements that I subsequently make:

My feeling is that a path is roughly equivalent to a triple crown in the old program - as ambiguous a statement as that is given how different districts consider the triple crown - but certainly as being equivalent to ~30-ish straight manual speeches.

My feeling is that in a Pathways world there is a much heavier focus on leadership roles and things outside the scope of presentations within the meeting. For example, the emotional journalling that occurs in Motivational Strategies Level 3 "Understanding Emotional Intelligence" takes a lot of time/effort (a couple weeks) and isn't directly comparable to any legacy project in my mind.

I feel that if you're comparing purely on the basis of speaking projects then there is a reduction in Pathways. If you're looking at it in terms of increased leadership focus then certainly there are some pretty massive changes and overall increases. I don't know how many DTM's you've completed in the legacy program, or how many paths you've completed in Pathways, but I'm not convinced that the path to DTM is shorter or easier thus far, based on my direct experience.

I'm a VPE myself and I usually use the president whenever I'm dealing with myself as a member. I've never had a case where he didn't agree with my logic for something but it seems better to keep things above board wherever you can.

I'm organizing a specialty event for International Women's Day bringing in a variety of successful women Toastmasters from the community to speak and participate in a meeting. This then dovetails into legacy projects for some members, e.g. PR and membership campaign, as well as other Pathways projects to assist with projects/meetings, etc.

Personally not a big fan of "open houses" in the traditional sense. I find running some kind of public facing meeting - e.g. mental health advocacy was one we did in the fall - are more effective and real world with the same net result. I just added my 29th member to put that in context.

My daughter, 2, is a little sponge. My son, 8, has some behavior issues. For example, walk into his bedroom one day to find a full container of garlic powder dumped everywhere. Lots of fun. Not malicious behavior but still frustrating.

My wife ends up seeing it more than I and her behavior is rather candid given that it's often just her and the kids.

Which led to my daughter walking into a messy room in public, assuming that it was her brother making the mess once more, and opening with a very deadpan "for fuck sakes".

From my second year mathematical logic university course, "the inverse of the converse of a statement, defined as the contrapositive, of a statement is logically equivalent to the original statement".

Original statement: "If I eat apples then I am healthy"

The inverse: "If I DO NOT eat apples then I am NOT healthy"

The converse: "If I am healthy then I eat apples"

The contrapositive: "If I am NOT healthy then I do NOT eat apples"

The truth of the original statement and the contrapositive are equivalent. It can be helpful if someone makes a bizarre statement and you need to look at it from a different angle but in a practical sense it is entirely useless on a day to day basis.

This is all good content. We've had really good success in Pathways so I'd like to note down the questions you raised as I'll cover it next time I'm doing training.

(1) Simplicity. e.g. "CC is 10 speeches". Pathways is made up of 10 paths with five levels each. Each path is 15 projects at minimum but there are many elective projects that you can complete if you're so inclined.

(2) Hokey projects. I agree that podcasting isn't relevant to a lot of people, although would comment that I did it to see what it was about and found it insightful. e.g. I didn't realize as a speaker how much I play off the audience until there was no audience. All of those hokey projects are elective and there are straight up "normal" speeches in every one of the electives.

If we're talking about metaphorical poison for clubs, I think that speeches outside of the educational program are poison for clubs.

Thanks for taking the time to write up this post as I will directly cover some of these points when I next train.

No, it's more on subject matter, etc. I worked in radio for my high school and university so the recording/leveling, etc. wasn't an issue, and frankly it takes about 10 seconds to do the hosting/RSS and so on. Short version is that if you use something like anchor.fm then it'll do the cross posting to the dozen platforms that are out there.

I'm surprised no one has said it, but using something like Easy-Speak avoids this entire issue. I've used a variety of home-built solutions for agenda creation and member tracking in my time in Toastmasters but Easy-Speak definitely takes the cake. It works really well in a Pathways world.

Easy Speak automatically tracks all history for the club once it's put into place - who did what roles on what date, what speech projects, titles, etc. If you use it then it's already tracking this for you, just a matter of clicking on the communication history link for a member.